ixia

Intellect and ixia are delighted to announce the launch of a new journal:
Art & the Public Sphere.

Art & the Public Sphere provides a new platform for academics, artists, curators, commissioners, art historians and theorists, whose working practices are broadly concerned with contemporary art’s relation to the public sphere. Art & the Public Sphere also presents a crucial examination of contemporary art’s link to the public realm, offering an engaged and responsive forum in which to debate the newly emerging series of developments within contemporary thinking, society and international art practice. It will be peer-reviewed and edited by Mel Jordan. (Click here to read Mel’s biog).

For information about the journal’s Editorial Board, click here.
For information about the journal’s Advisory Board, click here.

The journal voices a critical relationship towards the traditional and conventional debates about the specific field of public art, as well as towards the broader discussions and art practices in the public sector and the public realm. Whilst ‘public art’ has continually suffered from its mixed role as art and also town planning, in the UK for example the perceived success of Anthony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ has since recruited public art for the purposes of ‘placemaking’ and the branding of cities.

There exists a growing body of contemporary art practice and theory that by-passes the constraints of public art, public sector and public realm, in order to explore how the most ambitious and challenging art of the day intersects with its publics, not only via public spaces and public institutions, but also through a whole range of techniques and technologies of social engagement. Such engagements link specific questions about public art, to broader questions about art’s role within the history of Western democracy and art’s active participation in opinion formation, free discussion and political action.

At the same time, critical art is reemerging and is being reevaluated by the likes of Chantal Mouffe, linking contemporary art to broader questions of counter-hegemonic struggle, dissensus and political transformation. These developments are evident in contemporary buzzwords such as ‘participation’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘collective action’, which are becoming more central and further contested within contemporary art. Parallel to which are developments in art such as relational aesthetics and new genre public art, which are raising these very same issues within art’s own internal logic.

This new constellation is the context for contemporary art’s ‘social turn’ and the ‘art of encounter’. Relational art, for instance, calls forth a public for art that is not made up of viewers, instead it is an art of activity, encounter and conviviality. Critics of this work have argued that it neglects antagonism (Claire Bishop), reduces otherness (Jan Verwoert), commodifies experience (Stewart Martin), and promotes ‘NGO Art’ (BAVO). Simon Sheikh has also developed the critique of the Habermasian version of the public sphere in an account of post-publics. This field has been re-theorized recently by John Roberts in terms of art’s immersion into ‘general social technique’ which explains art’s new found ability to adopt the skills and practices of social work, the service economy, political action and so on.

At the same time as opening art to the techniques and forums of political and social activity, it also links art, perhaps uncomfortably, to broader shifts in culture and society, such as the impact of ‘third way’ politics. Art is more liable, therefore, to be instrumentalized by political leaders when it has already promoted itself as convivial, useful and helpful. The development of cultural policy and culture led regeneration has seized on art’s new settlement within the public sphere to cheaply implement social policy through art, and indeed art’s relation to the public sphere has taken criticism as a result.

Art in the public sphere is also implicated in the enormous growth of the biennial and the rise of the uber curator as signature-name for events over and above the artists, because these spectacular events are often given themes that tie the exhibition to social issues within the public sphere and are routinely defended in terms of their positive local social impact.

Importantly, therefore, Art & the Public Sphere provides a critical examination of contemporary art’s relation to the public realm, offering an engaged and responsive forum in which to debate the newly emerging series of developments within contemporary thinking, society and international art practice. The journal will develop a broad and complex set of discourses on the ‘public’, ‘publicness’, ‘making public’ and ‘publishing’, in the most conceptually ambitious sense. Questions about the public will be raised across a range of fields and positions, by potential readers and contributors including academics involved in: Fine Art, Art History, Art Theory, Architecture/Town Planning/Culture-led Regeneration, Cultural Geography, Cultural Studies, Politics, Sociology, and Philosophy (Aesthetics, Political, Social and Linguistic), in order to successfully communicate the interests of the entire community that is involved at originating, propagating or analyzing art practice within the public sphere.

Subscription information:
ISSN: 2042793X - 3 issues per volume
Personal subscriptions (print only):
£33/$45 per volume
Single issues - £12 per issue

Institutional subscriptions:
£132/$144 per volume (print and online)
£99/$114 per volume (online only)

To subscribe to the journal, please click here.

For further information, please click here to visit the intellect website.

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In collaboration with Intellect